The next morning, the jagged double ring of the hotel phone startled Eleanor awake. It was Ivy, tentative, asking how Eleanor had slept but not wanting to know how Eleanor had slept. Bucky was upset about the cachepot.
“What’s a cachepot?”
“You don’t know what a cachepot is?” Ivy said. “It’s a porcelain pot for hiding things. Last night the ice cream was meant to go in one. Instead, it got plunked down on the sideboard in its carton. In the Times-Picayune this morning you can see it, bold as life, right there among the Charbonneau china. Dreyer’s.”
Eleanor vaguely recalled. When the bananas Foster was served, someone had asked for ice cream. At the time, Taffy had been on hands and knees working on a wine spill, so Eleanor went into the kitchen and set the ice cream out herself…
“I know,” Ivy said. “We finally got to the bottom of it.”
Was this a joke?
“You made Bucky look like a philistine on a night that should have been a celebration of our engagement.”
“It was a celebration of your engagement.” Eleanor sat up in bed. Nausea welled.
There was an odd hesitation before Ivy spoke. Was it Bucky? Whispering?
“It was an insult to Bucky,” Ivy said. “It was an insult to his parents, and, worse, it was an insult to Taffy.”
“Taffy?” Eleanor said. “I was trying to help Taffy.”
“That’s just it,” Ivy said. “Taffy doesn’t need your help.”
“I’m sure she didn’t take it as an insult.”
“Bucky did and I did.”
Joe was awake now and shaking his head.
“Put Bucky on the phone,” Eleanor said, tears coming down in sheets. “I’ll apologize.”
“He doesn’t want to get on the phone.”
“I’ll apologize in person, at breakfast.”
Another weird pause. “It’s been a long night around here, waiting for the Times-Picayune to be delivered. Anyway, it’s the type of thing that should be done in writing. You can leave a letter with the concierge.”
Eleanor flew to the desk and clawed at the sliver of a drawer, wild for stationery. Joe had his running shoes on.
“It didn’t work for Neville Chamberlain,” he said. And then he headed out.
John Tyler, a Virginia legislator, was added to William Henry Harrison’s Whig ticket solely to deliver the Southern vote. When Harrison was sworn in on a freezing 1841 day, Tyler attended the inauguration. That evening, he returned to his plantation in Virginia, expecting few vice-presidential duties. A month later, a hand-delivered letter informed him that Harrison had died of pneumonia, making John Tyler the tenth president of the United States. Tyler, nicknamed “His Accidency,” governed without distinction. He chose not to run for reelection and, when his term was over, returned to the family plantation, Sherwood Forest. Because he accomplished so little in office, John Tyler is known in history books mainly for being the president who fathered the most children, fifteen. Because he was later elected to the Confederate congress, Tyler is also known for being the only president upon whose death the nation’s flag did not fly at half-mast.
Sherwood Forest is open to the public, although few tourists find reason to take the trip down Route 5, the John Tyler Highway, to the tidewater of Charles City County, Virginia. Astonishingly, John Tyler’s grandson is still alive and resides there with his wife. Sherwood Forest’s house, at three hundred feet, is the longest frame house in the country. It includes a seventy-foot-by-twelve-foot ballroom designed for the Virginia reel, Tyler’s favorite dance. Sherwood Forest’s sixteen hundred acres are dotted with former smokehouses, stables, and slave quarters. The twenty-five acres of terraced gardens include hundred-foot magnolias and maples as well as the first Gingko biloba tree planted in the United States, a gift to Tyler from Commodore Perry. Over the years, the Tyler family have received countless requests to rent Sherwood Forest for private parties. They’ve always declined.
Which was why, when Bucky Fanning phoned the Tylers with a request to get married at Sherwood Forest and was refused, once, twice, and three times, after which he got on a plane to Atlanta and drove the seven hours to Charles City County to make a personal appeal and the Tylers said yes, every toast at the rehearsal dinner mentioned this as quintessential Bucky.
“Either run with the big dogs or stay on the porch,” someone said.
Bucky. You really did have to love him.
Khaos’s party planner oversaw the June wedding. She spent the day itself welcoming a fleet of vans to Sherwood Forest carrying straight–from–New Orleans oysters, crawfish, milk rolls, and the full Jimmy Maxwell Orchestra. She was also tasked with navigating the delicate challenge of having a hundred and sixty-four guests on the groom’s side and two on the bride’s.